openSUSE Strategy

Please read also the Community Statement which is part of the strategy discussion and explains the openSUSE community itself.

(do not edit this page, it was the result of extensive, project-wide discussions)

openSUSE Mission Statement

(one paragraph summary)

The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The openSUSE community develops and maintains a packaging and distribution infrastructure which provides the foundation for the world's most flexible and powerful Linux distribution. Our community works together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the global Free and Open Source Software community.

openSUSE - the world's most flexible and powerful Linux distribution

The following document is a statement describing the openSUSE users, community, products and goals. The document is for internal use and guides communication and decision making within the community. It does not aim to limit anyone within the community to work on what they want!

What is openSUSE

We are the openSUSE Community - friendly, welcoming, vibrant, and active. The openSUSE Project provides an open and innovative atmosphere to collaboratively work on a variety of distribution-related and packaging technologies and products.

Our development philosophy focuses on stability and flexibility, innovative community infrastructure, and seeking collaboration with the wider Free and Open Source community.

Outlined below are more details on our community, product and infrastructure.

Community and People

The openSUSE community is the heart of the openSUSE project.

We encourage and enable the users in our community to contribute to openSUSE and to shape its future, lowering participation barriers in our community wherever possible.

The openSUSE community collaborates with other communities providing the best technology Free Software has to offer.

We care about contributing our improvements to upstream projects.

We work closely with companies in our ecosystem that provide additional value, including support and offerings on top of or derived from openSUSE technology.

Our community aims to foster the development of Free and Open Source Software while taking a pragmatic approach to what we ship to our users, allowing them to use proprietary alternatives if they choose to.

Distribution

The openSUSE distribution offers a powerful, stable core and enables everybody to contribute additional packages and tools through the openSUSE Build Service: freedom and choice are our keywords.

The openSUSE software distribution offers:

A powerful, stable core

Rich out of the box experience based on sane defaults with powerful tools for system configuration and customization

Flexibility and freedom of choice with a wide software selection

Timed releases and an easy upgrade path between maintained versions of the official distribution

A rolling release to ensure up to date applications for those who wish it

Seamless integration and compatibility with other operating systems and tools

openSUSE is distributed on workstations, laptops, netbooks and servers while working together with mobile, web, cloud and other leading industry technologies.

Tools and services

The freely available openSUSE tools and services aim to support the collaborative development process within openSUSE and we encourage other projects to leverage them.

We take advantage of our infrastructure to make up to date software available for multiple current releases for a variety of distributions including older releases of openSUSE

We provide technology to easily build openSUSE derivatives in the form of live images, appliances and even full distributions

We share our infrastructure technology such as openSUSE Build Service with others, providing them with tools to create whole distributions or single packages for a variety of platforms

Target users

The project caters to users who are interested in computers and want to get work done, experiment or learn. We offer a stable and enjoyable computing experience which does not limit freedom of choice; offering sane defaults and easy configuration.

Clarifications

What do we not focus on?

The openSUSE community has its goals and targets; consequently there are things that are not in the direct focus of our community. Of course this does not mean it is not possible to pursue any of those goals from within the openSUSE project or using the openSUSE tools - we are a Free and Open Source Software community and anything is possible.

openSUSE does not:

Oversimplify the system to the point where configuring it becomes harder. We prefer flexibility over an (extreme) focus on ease of use.

Always have the latest and greatest in the shipped releases. Through the Build Service you can install the latest packages or whole software groups built for your openSUSE version, preserving the stability and integrity of the rest of your installation. If you want the latest stable software, Tumbleweed offers you a rolling release repository. And if you want to follow the latest development version of openSUSE, Factory is there for you.

Maintain large distribution-specific patches as we want to upstream as much of our work as possible.

Work on Mobile or embedded devices.

Offer enterprise-level support. We don't work on software or hardware certification, indemnification, OEM installations and the like. However we ensure our infrastructure enables our partners to offer these services.